


so much older (than I can take)

by pprfaith



Series: Author's Favourites [8]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Ableist Language, Alcohol, Angst and Humor, Body Horror, Bucket List, Cancelled Apocalypse, Explicit Language, From the person in question, I was trying to be funny, I'm not sorry, M/M, Now go back and read the 'slow build' tag again, References to Suicide, Slow Build, Tattoos, This is a monster, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 06:16:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Chuck doesn’t die, Raleigh makes them all work off their bucket lists because none of them really thought they’d make it and they are all so young. Also featuring grumpy chefs, pudding, Mako, and emotionally stunted boys.</p><p>Now with fixed formatting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	so much older (than I can take)

**Author's Note:**

> I started this because I noticed I did not have a bucket list fic in my repertoire. Then I tried to bribe someone with it and then I forgot about it and then I remembered it and finished it. I tried to be funny. It might have gone wonky. I'm not sorry. That's many 'I's. Concrit appreciated.

+

Chuck survives Operation Pitfall. 

No-one is more surprised than he is and for a moment, just after waking up, he seriously thinks there must have been some sort of mistake. Because he said goodbye to his dog, he let his father know he loves him, he fought a good fight with one of the best men he ever met and then it was done.

It was okay.

Chuck always expected to go out as a hero, big and loud. (And if no-one heard the explosion this deep under water, well. We don’t always get what we want, do we?)

It was okay.

And then he woke up.

His left leg is fucked. Still attached, mind you, but looking at it sometimes makes him wish it wasn’t. He has burns all down one side. He is, effectively, a cripple. 

What a fucking way to go. Or not, as the case seems to be. 

Because Chuck Hansen closed his eyes expecting to die for the world and woke up in the Shatterdome three weeks later with his father’s bloodshot eyes staring him down.

He’s not sure what the fuck to make of that.

+

He spends the first months mostly sleeping or doing weak-ass physio. Like, today we’re going to raise your leg an inch, Chuck, come on, you can do it. He makes five therapists cry before they find him one who is, more or less, a functioning deaf/mute. Alex doesn’t give a fuck about the venom Chuck spits at him at all hours.

But after those first long months, he’s actually awake for more than meals and potty time and he has time to think. (The horror.)

It does things to his head. 

Like, when he was sixteen, he wrote a bucket list.

All Academy cadets do, at some point. It’s something the shrinks tell them to do. Write down things you want to do in your life. It’s supposed to give them something to live for, or some such shit.

Chuck’s list had seventeen items.

The first was _avenge Mom_. 

One of them was _kiss Mori_ , another one _have decent sex._

At twenty-two (he spent his birthday in a drug-induced coma, fucking A), he still hasn’t managed that one. The last item is _tell Dad._

Just that. He remembers that he meant to spell out what to tell Herc, but he never found the words. Not even at the end of the world. 

He lost that list ages ago. It landed in the washing machine, or got dumped out of a random pocket, whatever. But lying in bed with a bum leg after the end of the world, Chuck remembers that list and all seventeen items on it. He asks Herc for something to write on and gets a little black notebook and a Kaiju-bobble-head pen (“Raleigh says hi.”).

He rewrites his bucket list propped up on Max’s broad back, spends a little time fiddling with the numbers until he’s got it all in the right order again and then falls asleep with dog and notebook in his lap.

+

When he wakes again, the has-been is sitting in the chair that has become Herc’s ages ago. 

He does that sometimes, just show up in the middle of the night to talk a little or creepily stare at Chuck while he’s asleep. Chuck suspects that he’s some sort of insomniac-entertainment, but since he’s just about bored enough to start banging his head against the wall himself, he never actually tells the older pilot to fuck off.

Oh, he picks fights, alright, and they snap and bitch at each other for hours, but somehow Raleigh always leaves with a small grin on his face and Chuck? Doesn’t really feel much anger anymore these days.

Number one is done, finally. Mom is avenged. He died and survived it. The world ended and didn’t. 

Anger is hard to come by these days.

Today though, Chuck might actually manage to scrape some up, because Becket’s got his notebook open in his hands and is reading his damn list. He lunges, pulls it from the other man’s grip, snarling, “Privacy, asshole.”

Raleigh raises his hands, palms forward, smiles. “Sorry. I didn’t know they still made you write those.”

His smile is fucking disarming, as always, and Chuck hates him for it. (Lie.)

He closes the book and fights the urge to shove it under his pillow, or something equally childish and dumb. 

But Raleigh just keeps talking. “I had one of those.” His smiles falls a little, gets sad. Chuck hates himself for being able to tell. “I burned it, after.”

After Alaska. After Knifehead. 

When Raleigh Becket doesn’t finish sentences, it’s always that. He rubs at his wrists above his ugly sweater, then pushes one of them back, just a little, to show Chuck the scars he’s long since glimpsed anyway, in the Kwoon. They’re ropey and thick and run from the other pilot’s wrists almost to his elbows, mirroring each other neatly. Down the road. None of that across-the-street, cry-for-help fuckery.

“Didn’t seem to be a point,” he remarks, off-handedly, shoves the sleeve back down. (Like this is the kind of conversation they usually have.)

They stay like that, Chuck with his bucket list in his hands, Raleigh tracing his suicide scars through his sweater, neither talking.

This is what happens to heroes when the war’s over, apparently. 

Then, suddenly, Raleigh says, “We should do something about that.”

He points at Chuck’s lap and it takes Chuck a second to realize he means the list and not, like, Chuck’s dick. 

“Yeah,” he quips, “How about we don’t, mate.”

But the has-been has already grabbed the pen and notebook back, flipped it open to an empty page. He starts scribbling.

“Sure,” Chuck grumps. “Take my things. Write on them. Please, be my fucking guest. What the hell, Becket?”

Raleigh shushes him. Fucking _shushes_ him, and keeps scribbling. 

“I am going to kick your arse!”

“First,” is the only response he gets, glib, “you need to get out of that bed.” The pen stops moving. The pilot looks up. “How long until they let you go anyway?”

“About another week,” Chuck answers, then remembers that he’s pissed. “Give me that, has-been!”

He tries to lunge for it again, but Raleigh is faster this time, goes back to writing, out of reach. Chuck really wants his leg to be able to support him again because he needs to fuck Becket up. A lot. 

“I think we should switch off. One of yours, one of mine. Mind if Mako comes? I know she has one of those,” he waves the notebook, “flying around somewhere.”

Then, without waiting for an actual, you know, answer, he stands, kicks the chair back into place and tucks the notebook into a pocket of his stupid cargo pants. He tries to ruffle Chuck’s hair.

Chuck tries to take his hand off.

“Later! Don’t be mean to Alex!”

+

So Chuck is maybe still a little bit angry. As long as Raleigh Becket is around to draw it out of him.

And he’s not ashamed to admit that he bribes Li, the aging terrorist in charge of the cafeteria, into whispering vague threats under his breath whenever Becket gets close to him. 

Psychological warfare at its finest, bitches.

+

Somehow, Chuck’s _private, personal_ bucket list must make the rounds, because by the time Raleigh drops it back off at his room, ten more pages are filled with at least four different handwritings.

One of them belongs to Raleigh and the other Chuck remembers from the Academy. Mako.

The other two are a mystery. The first looks like it was scribbled by a ferret on drugs. The first item is _full back piece_ , whatever that means.

“What the fuck, Becket?”

Raleigh leans over, looks at what Chuck is looking at. “Oh, that. I went looking for a hat and Newt asked what it was for. He got in on it. So did Hermann, although I’m pretty sure sexual favors were involved in that.”

Since the first item of the last list reads _find a way to shut Newt up_ and the second _learn to resist Dr. Geiszler_ , Chuck guesses they were. Yuck. 

Why anyone would want to hit either of those two freaks is beyond him. Well, not hit hit. That he gets, fully. But… sexually hit. Newt is insane and Gottlieb is… Chuck looks down the length of his hospital bed at where his mangled leg lies under the sheets. They tell him he might be able to walk without a crutch or cane in a year, if he really works at it. 

To distract himself, he asks the obvious question. “What the fuck do you need a hat for?”

As if on cue, Raleigh produces a top hat from behind his back. Honest to god fucking top hat. What the hell?

“What the hell?”

“Mako’s idea. I would have just crossed off items, but she said we should write everything on pieces of paper and then draw them. Newt called it randomization something before Hermann made him shut up.”

How exactly Raleigh ended up on a first name basis with the dourest person Chuck’s ever met (including himself) in under three months, Chuck will never know. 

“I repeat,” he says, very slowly, notebook lowered into his lap. “What. The. Hell. Becket?”

Raleigh doesn’t sigh, or anything so plebeian. He just sinks into the hard hospital chair like a suffering god and says, in his serious voice, “The bucket lists, Chuck. We all have them and none of us expected…” he shakes his head. “With the PPDC and the Jaeger program up in the air, we have too much time and none of us really have anywhere to go.”

(Chuck is the only one out of the five people in that book that has any family left.)

“So we thought we’d write our lists out on paper, draw items and then do them.”

His hand’s gone to his opposite wrist again and Chuck _hurts_ , suddenly, all over.

“You’re insane, this is not a telenovela, and I hate you. I just thought you should know.”

Then he scoots down on the bed, lies flat and presses his pillow over his face. 

+

The day Chuck is finally, finally released from prison, sorry, the infirmary, he is greeted by a four-man ambush in the hallway. Max, trotting ahead of him, happily wags his tail at Mako and collects his cuddles. 

Traitor. 

Raleigh stands blocking the hallway with the science dweebs on either side of him. Newt looks like an eager puppy, which is his default expression, and Gottlieb looks like Newt, the eager puppy, just pissed on his leg, which is _his_ default expression.

“Hey, Chuck,” Raleigh greets and Gottlieb takes the chance to announce, “I would like to have it noted – again – that I am here only under duress and that I do not see the sense in this entire endeavor. It is childish and unbecoming of people of our station and – “

Whatever else he wants to say is lost when Newt clamps a hand over his mouth and leans in to whisper something in his ear. 

Judging from the colour the good doctor’s ears turn, it’s filthy. Judging from the way Raleigh sidles a few steps to the side with a grimace of horror on his face, he’s going to have nightmares from it.

Chuck totally figured Newt for a sexual deviant, but honestly, not Gottlieb. 

Apparently, he was wrong.

Mako finally finishes corrupting his damn dog and straightens. She carries a box that’s just about the right size and shape for a top hat.

“Gentlemen,” she announces, “let’s do this.”

Chuck snorts. “Yeah, you get right on with that, ducks. I’m outta here.”

He tries to spin on his heel and barely manages to catch himself on his crutches when his bad leg gives out under him. Cussing violently, he rights himself and tries to limp off with the rest of his dignity dragging behind him like Linus’s fucking blanket.

Fucking cripple.

Then fucking Becket is fucking there, pointing a fucking finger at his fucking face and Chuck would punch him _so hard_ , if he didn’t need both hands to not fall flat on his fucking face. 

Fuck!

“You know you can’t outrun us, right Chuck?”

It’s absolutely true and also the most insensitive thing anyone has ever said to Chuck _in his life_. He doesn’t know whether to love or hate Raleigh for that. At least someone isn’t walking on eggshells around him.

Mako cuffs him on the back of his head anyway.

He mutters something Japanese under his breath and then tucks his arm around her shoulders, pressing his nose to her temple. How cute. 

“Come on, Chuck,” he finally says. “What else are you going to do, sit in your room and feel sorry for yourself?”

He’s pushing Chuck’s buttons. Chuck _knows_ that. The problem is, it’s still working anyway because that is absolutely what he was going to do and he hates himself for it, even if only a little. 

So, yeah. He balances on his good leg, leans one of his crutches into his side and grabs the box with the other. “I am going to win this thing, Becket, just so you fucking know.”

Then he shoves the box back at Mako. “Get that open.”

She complies. Raleigh inconspicuously angles himself to catch Chuck if and when he goes faceplanting into the floor again. “You know this isn’t a competition, right?”

Chuck shoves his finger into the has-been’s face. “Watch me, mate. Watch me!”

+

“Yeah, I’m out of here.”

“Oh, come on, Chuck, it’s harmless.”

Newt nods, waving the piece of paper he just drew. It says _kiss Herc Hansen_ in Raleigh’s weirdly graceful chicken scratch.

From the lovely shade of red she’s turning, this one’s off of Mako’s list. (The colour clashes horribly with her blue streaks.)

Chuck, who’s still fishing for his second crutch, gives the scientist a withering glare. “That’s my dad we’re talking about, mate.”

“Don’t be a baby,” Newt says. 

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck _you_!”

“Gentlemen,” Mako cuts them off. “We don’t have to…”

“Oh, but we do, don’t we, Mako?” Chuck snaps. Because that’s the rules they agreed on five minutes ago. Whatever they draw, they all do it. 

Chuck really doesn’t want to kiss his old man. But he let himself be goaded into this by Raleigh and he won’t back down now. He was never going to leave anyway. (Really.)

“Them’s the rules. So let’s go.”

They all stand, leaving the top hat in the lab, and start making their way up toward the Marshall’s office. It’s a slow trek, since two fifths of their merry band are cripples, but somehow the other three manage to not make it a big deal, even when Chuck is grinding his teeth.

Newt just sort of bounces around Gottlieb like he has been for the past ten years and Mako and Raleigh are all tangled together, strolling along like a couple in love. 

Chuck fights to go faster.

They make it, eventually, and Raleigh takes point because this was all his fucking idea anyway. 

“Rangers, Doctors,” Herc greets them when they all come piling into the office. Chuck just sinks into the nearest chair and doesn’t even pretend he’s not relieved to do so. 

“Sir,” Raleigh returns.

He stands in front of the desk, at parade rest, hands behind his back, staring at Herc, the perfect soldier. After a moment, though, he grins a little and bites his lip. Herc slouches a little in his seat. 

“Raleigh,” he greets, again.

“Herc,” Raleigh returns and this is kind of bizarre. No, seriously. Chuck knows that the has-been and his old man like each other, for some weird reason he can’t begin to understand, but they’re being weird, even by his standards. 

He’s suddenly glad he won’t be drifting again anytime soon (or ever), because he absolutely does not need to know if they’re fucking or not. Yeurgh.

“What brings you here?”

Raleigh shrugs and then lets his shoulders drop. “We’re working off our collective bucket lists, and your name’s come up in connection to our first item.”

He’s not mean enough to shoot a look at Mako, hanging back with the docs, but he somehow manages to implicate her with the tone of his voice alone. Chuck’s impressed. Herc blinks and looks at his only son, who can only shrug. 

“Don’t look at me, I was blackmailed.” 

“Lie,” Newt coughs, not at all subtly. 

“Aaaaanyway,” Raleigh cuts off. “Can you just, hold still for a minute? Then we’ll be out of your hair.”

“What, exactly, do you plan to do to me, Raleigh?” Herc asks, looking more amused than anything. Chuck twitches. Bad choice of words, old man.

Raleigh opens his mouth to explain, but Newt loses his patience, groans and stomps forward. “This is gonna take forever, just let me…”

And then he leans across the desk and plants a big, sloppy kiss on Herc, just like that, no warning. Chuck sees the old man’s fist come up, ready to punch the little freak off, but then he catches himself and Newt pulls back. 

He licks his lips.

Chuck is going to have nightmares.

“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? No, I hope not, I’ve never had complaints before, you were taking too long, Raleigh, sorry.”

He beams at everyone and slinks back to Gottlieb’s side.

Herc looks… Chuck has never seen that expression on his father’s face before. He wishes for a camera. It’s kind of… neat. 

But then the old man pulls himself together like the professional he is and asks, almost, _almost_ not sounding like he’s just waiting for them to leave the office before he laughs his ass off, “Was that it?”

Raleigh scratches his head. “Uhm, no. We agreed that we all have to do it.”

Why is Chuck here again?

Better yet, why is he associating with these people at all?

Herc points at the five of them, one after the other. “All of you.”

They nod. 

“Want to kiss me?”

Chuck and Hermann shake their heads. The rest nods. Raleigh provides a helpful, “Rules.”

With a sigh, Marshall Hercules Hansen stands, rounds his desk and plants his ass on the corner, arms half outstretched. “Well, go on then, before I have you all court-martialled.”

Raleigh beams and dives in, planting a kiss on Herc’s cheek with a grin, chirping, “Thanks, Herc,” when he’s done and backing off to the side. He looks like he’s having fun. 

Hermann sighs and busses his lips across Herc’s next, then frowns and limps away. Apparently, Europeans don’t get embarrassed.

Mako shuffles her feet a little and then, when Herc’s grin is starting to go a bit gooey at the edges, she launches herself forward. Unsurprisingly, she kisses as demurely as she does everything else, lips closed, eyes closed, looking perfectly serene. 

She’s scarlet again when she pulls away and Herc looks like he’s about to bust a gut. He looks at Chuck. “One left to go, son.”

Chuck rolls his eyes, sighs, and clambers to his feet. He pecks the old man on the cheek, only to be pulled into a hug that he can’t get out of, because he needs both his hands to stay vertical. 

“Good to see you having fun, son,” Herc whispers in his ear, and the idea that he’s only playing along for Chuck’s sake, makes the younger Hansen choke up a little. He hates it and pulls away with a muttered _whatever_.

Herc ruffles his hair. 

He ducks away, loses his balance a little and bumps into goddamn Becket, who appears out of nowhere to steady him. Angrily, he pulls out of the hold and starts to hobble off. 

Herc laughs again and makes a shooing motion at them. “Now, that was for fun and never leaves this room, am I clear? And any trouble you get into while working down that list, I’m not bailing you out. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” they all chorus, dutifully. Even the doctors chime in. 

He nods, satisfied, and gives Raleigh’s shoulder a nudge toward the door. “Off you go, some of us have to work.”

\+ 

By silent agreement, they all troop back down to the labs before anyone speaks. Predictably, the first person to open their gob is Newt.

“Wow. I did not expect the old dude to be this chill about the whole thing.” 

“Newton! He is our superior. Show a little respect!”

“Dude, you just kissed the guy!”

“Only in accordance with the rules we agreed upon and _after_ he gave permission, which, I would like to say, you did not, that isn’t just bad manners, that is sexual harassment, Newton, do you have any idea…”

Chuck tunes them out. Old. Married. Couple.

Mako, who still isn’t back to her usual colour, puts a hand to her mouth, then shrugs. “It was not as embarrassing as I feared.”

Since Chuck knows his dad is pretty much an old hand at dealing with groupie crushes, he says nothing. Mako drops her hand, smiles. “I will see you later,” she says, and then takes off.

“Well, someone’s eager to tell her diary about this.” That from Newt.

Hermann slaps at him. “You are impossible. Come, help me move the boards.”

And then they’re off, too, leaving the two remaining pilots alone. Raleigh looks happy. 

“So, what now?” Chuck finds himself asking. “We just keep this up until we run out of shit to do?”

Raleigh gives him a long look, then shrugs. “Why not? Mako’s helping with the conversion of the Shatterdome and Newt and Hermann are trying to write up ten years worth of research papers. Apart from that, none of us have anything to do or anywhere to be. I’d rather do some dumb things that stare at a wall all day. Nothing good comes from that.”

He says it with the voice and weight of someone who’s tried and nearly gone mad over it and Chuck doesn’t need the other man to do anything as obvious as rub his scars again. Raleigh had a lot of silence, he guesses, five years ago. The Marshall more or less whisked him away from everything and everyone to heal and as soon as he could walk again, he busted out of there and disappeared without anyone to help him sort out his head.

But that was a loss, and what happened here three months ago was victory. “It’s not the same,” Chuck tells him, without explaining the rest of that train of thought.

Somehow the has-been gets it anyway. “Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been staring at a lot of walls lately.”

Chuck looks at where the old married couple is still bitching each other out, over by Hermann’s blackboards. Like everything is as it’s always been and nothing changed at all.

“I reckon the whole not dying thing was a bit of a surprise,” he finally admits, hands clenching and unclenching around his crutches.

Eventually, Raleigh takes pity on him and says, “Let’s get some grub.”

+

Apparently, idiocy comes in sporadic bursts, because the next time Chuck hears about Operation Bucket List is three days later. 

They’re sitting at lunch when Mako comes in, drops the top hat between their trays and says, “I want to draw this time.”

She draws.

“ _Get black-out blitzed_ ,” she reads off the paper before folding it neatly in halves and halves again and tucking it away. “Who wrote that one?”

She doesn’t look at Newt or Raleigh, like she can eliminate them on the spot. Chuck reckons that’s true. In terms of years, Hermann is the oldest of them, somewhere in the mid-thirties, followed by Newt. But in years _lived_ , Raleigh and Newt share the lead. 

Mako and Chuck are barely out of their glorious teens, if he’s honest, and Hermann has always struck Chuck as a… turtle, somehow. Long-lived, but slow.

“It’s mine,” he volunteers, raising his hand and almost spearing Gottlieb with his fork. Raleigh purses his lips in that ridiculous old-lady way of his and scrunches up his face. It’s stupid that that man’s at all sexy, making faces like that. “That’s gonna be hard. I think they drank Hong Kong dry at the after party.”

Newt grumps. “You maybe. Hermann and I were kidnapped to the infirmary.”

Chuck points at his leg mutely. Mako shakes her head. She probably didn’t feel like partying a few hours after Pentecost went out in his blast of glory, either. Chuck doesn’t know if Raleigh got plastered during that (reportedly absolutely epic) party, but the way he said ‘they’ and not ‘we’ implies he didn’t. 

Wow, they’re just a riot waiting to happen, aren’t they?

“We’re going to need to see who has some alcohol left.”

Gottlieb makes a derisive noise. “Please. We have a distillery in the lab.”

Chuck can probably bribe the chef and maybe - 

Wait, what?

The look he gets says that he a) said that out loud and b) is stupid. “It’s basic chemistry, not hard at all. While the taste is debatable, the stuff certainly does what it is intended to do.”

“Providing,” Newt adds out of the corner of his mouth, “that you intent to use it to strip paint off a jaeger.”

From the way he jumps, he gets a cane to the shin for that. “Sorry, sorry, ouch! Sorry! I love your black burned, I really do, Hermann’s moonshine for the win, you should patent that, stop hitting me, ouch!”

Raleigh claps his hands, reminding Chuck of his first grade teacher trying to get the attention of a dozen hyperactive six-year-olds. “Alright then. After dinner at the labs?”

He looks at everyone for confirmation. Chuck spears a bit of carrot. “I can’t believe we’re setting a date to get shit-faced, mate.”

+

“This stuff is rat poison,” he informs Raleigh when the man sits down next to him a few hours later, pilfered mug full of illicit paint-stripper in hand.

The other man smiles casually and downs half the thing in one go. Without coughing up a storm, the way Chuck still does after every sip. His only consolation is that Mako isn’t doing much better than him.

Things are already getting fuzzy around the edges, though, so that’s fine. 

“No, no, no,” Newt chides from where he’s flat on the floor, shirt rucked up under his armpits. “With your mouth.”

Mako scowls at him, kittenish, and then goes back to trying to take a body shot from the scientist’s tattooed chest. Hermann watches, disapproval clear in every line of his body. Although, Chuck suspects, it’s more the moonshine the two of them are spilling, than the actual act of teaching Mako how to do body shots.

“So how come you’ve never been really drunk before?”

Chuck takes a sip, bites his tongue and manages to swallow without spitting fire. How anyone would want to do this regularly is a mystery to him. “I was underage, back in the glory days.”

When booze and tail were still the staples of a pilot’s life, when the jaeger programme meant being a superstar, not a relic. By the time he was old enough to partake, the glory days were over and they were losing more ground than they were gaining. Funerals never really seemed like a place to get blitzed. 

Raleigh snorts. “Those were the days.” He takes a fortifying sip. “My first time was the day we enlisted. Yancy got me so drunk, I thought I was blind for a few hours.”

They watch Mako mess up again and drop the beaker Newt stuck in his belly button. It shatters on impact. 

“Said he couldn’t let me die for my country without ever having been drunk.”

The irony in that doesn’t escape Chuck and, in an uncharacteristic moment of compassion, he raises his own beaker. “To the smartest Becket.”

They drink. 

It still tastes like jeager fuel. 

Mako finally gives up and comes over to where they’re sitting against the wall. She folds herself neatly in Raleigh’s lap, leaning her head against his shoulder and stealing his mug for a sip. She hands it back and Raleigh takes it without looking, raising his arm just in time for her to swing her legs around to his left hip, getting cosy. He lowers his arm and she settles her hands on his bicep, massaging softly at where the drive suit is burned into his skin, like circuitry on human flesh. The scars probably hurt in the constant dampness of the ‘dome.

“Eugh,” Chuck announces, “you two are freakish.”

“Ghost drifting,” Gottlieb supplies, rolling over in his swivel chair, looking down at them. “It is an interesting phenomenon.”

Then he promptly snaps his cane out horizontally, stopping Newt sneaking up behind him. “That broken glass will not clean itself up, Newton.”

“What are you, my mother?”

“I sincerely hope not. Off you toddle.” 

Newt makes a face at his back.

“I saw that.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Alright, then I _felt_ it.”

Mako and Raleigh start laughing in sync. “Looks like you got hit, too,” Becket points out. 

Gottlieb nods. For someone who’s already drunk an entire mug of his own moonshine, he’s strangely solemn. “Unfortunately. How come you aren’t feeling it, Ranger Hansen?”

Chuck shrugs, uncomfortable. Pentecost kept his promise: he brought nothing into the drift with him and dad… They’ve been drifting for longer than any other pair left alive now. Sometimes he simply can’t tell whose habit is whose anymore, and who thought what first. Somewhere in his noggin, the memory of his own conception is rattling around. He remembers his mother from his own perspective and her husband’s. 

But he and Herc have so much practice ignoring the shit out of what the drift brings them, that they never even mention it. Silence has always been their way of dealing with things and even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t know how to verbalize that sense of one-is-two. To anyone. 

Raleigh comes to the rescue. “After a while, you get so used to it, you don’t even notice it. Mako and I are feeling the hangover so badly because we only drifted a few times. But now,” he waves a hand vaguely. (There are no jaegers left. The tech is obsolete. They’ll probably never drift again.) “We’ll have to come down the old-fashioned way.”

“Sex helps,” Gottlieb supplies and yeah, okay, Europeans are definitely born without an embarrassment gene because Chuck just about does a spit take and the German doesn’t bat an eyelash. 

Mako shrugs, Raleigh shakes his head. They bump their foreheads together, again in perfect sync, and Chuck tells himself he’s not jealous. (Since he doesn’t even know what he’s jealous _of_ , that one actually works out fairly well.)

“Okay, this is getting morose, can’t we, like, play a game or something?”

+

Two hours later, Chuck is pretty sure he has played every drinking game there is. Among them Spin the Bottle, Truth or Dare, I Never and some perverse game geared toward getting everyone completely blitzed in the shortest possible amount of time. That one came from Gottlieb, surprisingly (or not, he’s learning to expect the unexpected from that man). He called it “Mäxchen”. 

It involves cards and having to do certain things when a certain card comes up and if you miss your cue, which you inevitably do, Chuck has found out, because you are _drunk_ , you need to take a shot. 

He took seven in under a minute because the game doesn’t stop just because you have to drink. Raleigh matched him. As did Newt, who, at some point, just started taking a shot every round because he never got it right anyway.

Mako, of course, aces the game, her competitive streak coming through loud and clear. She’s sitting across from Gottlieb and the two are firing cards and commands at each other, neither of them ever missing a beat.

Raleigh, still sitting next to Chuck blinks. Very. Slowly. “That’s a little frightening.”

“Mhm.”

“No, really. I can _feel_ how drunk Mako is and it doesn’t show.”

“I think Gottlieb’s a functioning alcoholic,” Chuck contributes to the conversation.

“He’s German. They get born with an extra liver.”

“Really? Where’d they put it?”

“Stomach, probably. Wow, we’re drunk.”

“This is going to feel horrible tomorrow, isn’t it?”

Raleigh thinks for a moment, then holds up three fingers. “Two ways to avoid a hangover,” he explains grandly, then points at Newt, sprawled across a lab table, snoring. “That’s not one of ‘em. Either you drink, like, a bucket full of water before going to bed, or you just stay awake until the alcohol is outta your system.”

“How long’s that take?”

With a critical glance at their drinks – they stopped magically refilling when Newt passed out – he hazards a guess, “A week? Maybe a month? Doesn’t matter, I don’t sleep anyway. And neither do you.”

Chuck raises his beaker. “Here’s to inso…inso… not being able to sleep.”

Raleigh bangs his mug against it. “Here’s to getting that off the list. You’re a man now, baby Hansen.”

Chuck scowls, or tries to. His face isn’t working right. Raleigh reaches up, pats his cheek and coos a little. Slowly and to the noises of Mako and Gottlieb smack talking over a ridiculous German drinking game, he falls asleep.

+

“Congratulations, son!” a voice booms right by his ear. Chuck’s head explodes.

Or he wishes it did.

“Your first hangover! How does it feel?!”

Chuck rolls over, groping for his pillow to pull over his head and drown out his father, who is a sadist. Only instead of his soft mattress, he’s greeted by the hard floor and instead of his pillow, he only gets a fistful of lumpy sweater.

Raleigh swats at his hand and Chuck tries to curse, only his own voice makes his teeth rattle. He moans. 

“I told you to drink a lot before you went to sleep,” comes the groggy comment from one side.

On his other side, Herc, the asshole, laughs. Loudly. “From the looks of my boy, he did.”

He pats Chuck on the head. As soon as his brain stops pulsing out of his ears, Chuck is going to murder the old man. Possibly bludgeon him to death with his crutches. 

Right now, though, all he manages it a weak, “Fuck you,” followed by, “fuck the list.”

Herc laughs again. “Yeah, I heard about last night’s draw. From Dr. Gottlieb and Miss Mori, of all people.”

Raleigh makes a noise like a dying kitten. “I told ‘em to stay outta the caf.”

“They did. Instead, they went directly to Li’s room and tried to order him to make them pizza.”

Chuck can feel Raleigh wince. “I don’t think Li likes me very much,” he remarks. Then, “They get into trouble?”

“Nah. That hangover’s punishment enough. Isn’t it, son?” He asks the last right next to Chuck’s ear. Forget murdering the old man, Chuck’s going to find a way to off _himself_ with his crutches, just to end this misery.

“Gottlieb’s probably faking,” Chuck whispers carefully. Just to prove to himself he’s not dead and in hell. “He’s German. They have an extra liver.”

Herc pats his head again. “Not sober yet, then.”

“I hate you.”

“I know,” comes the complacent answer. “Let’s get you cleaned up. You stink like a whole bar.”

Together, they manage to get Chuck upright and his crutches under him. The world only spins for a minute or so and when it stops, Chuck kicks Raleigh in the ribs with his good leg. “This is all your fault,” he snaps. Very quietly. “Asshole.”

Raleigh, who’s on his back, hands folded under his head like the floor is the most comfortable place he’s ever slept, grins, unrepentantly. “It was awesome. Admit it.”

Chuck huffs and stalks out of the lab. Or tries to. At the doors, he has to stop and fumble to get them open, until Herc reaches across to help him out. “Don’t need your help,” he bites out. 

“I know,” Herc says, quietly, and gives it anyway. 

They walk quietly next to each other, Herc pacing himself to match his crippled son. Chuck watches him periodically get ahead and then slow down again and hates it. Himself. Something. 

His head still keeps time with his heartbeat. He’s never drinking again.

“Did you have fun, at least?”

Did he? He remembers maudlin talk, bad drinking games and not really seeing the point. Everything else is eclipsed by the pain in his skull. He feels like he went five rounds with a Kaiju. 

“Yeah. I did.”

He wonders where Max is. 

“Good. That’s... good. I’m glad you’re... making friends. Real friends.”

They really suck at this. 

Remembering, suddenly, the way he wanted to pull Mako and Raleigh apart last night, split them up somehow, surgically remove them from each other, he blurts, “I miss drifting.”

Herc stops, looks at Chuck. “Yeah?”

He nods. “Yeah,” he admits. He’ll blame the hangover later. “Words... are bloody hard.”

This time, dad’s laugh isn’t the intentionally obnoxious one from before, but a quieter, more real one. “True,” he agrees.

They keep in step the rest of the way to Chuck’s room.

+

It doesn’t take a week for Chuck to sober up. It only takes two days.

Still feels like the longest, most miserable two days since he woke up in the infirmary and they told him he’d never run again. 

He’s not dead.

But hangovers, he learns, make him wish he was.

+

Raleigh checks up on him twice a day, possibly under orders from the new Marshall. 

On the second day, he brings movies. Chuck has never seen the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Apparently, it’s a travesty.

“Does anything ever actually _happen_?” Chuck asks about an hour into the first movie. 

Raleigh scratches at his temple. “Yeah. Not in the first one. Sorry.”

“Then why are we watching it?”

“It’s a classic.” 

“Classic piece of crap,” Chuck judges and Raleigh apparently takes offense, because he lunges across the bed and wrestles Chuck into a chokehold. 

“Take that back,” he orders, hand poised for a noogie.

Chuck’s leg is throbbing with pain and this is the first time since the Breach that someone isn’t treating him like spun glass. He clamps his teeth together and kicks out with his good leg, catching the other pilot in the knee. An elbow to the gut and somehow, he’s on top.

“What was that, old man?”

“I said,” Raleigh repeats, “take that back.” He reaches up, gives Chuck that noogie anyway and doesn’t do anything to free himself.

Chuck falls asleep before the Hobbits ever make it to Rivendell. Raleigh lets him sleep.

+

The third draw goes to Raleigh, who does his duty with exaggerated seriousness in the middle of breakfast three days later. Chuck’s pretty sure his blood alcohol levels are _finally_ back to normal, and happily shovels eggs into his mouth, when the has-been frowns, looking down at his draw.

“We agreed that we all have to do everything in here, right?” he shakes the damn top hat for emphasis. 

“Yes.” Mako nods.

“Then it looks like we’re all getting a ‘full back piece’.” 

“What?” Chuck asks, the same time as Mako. Gottlieb looks like he already knows. 

Newt looks gleeful as he explains, “Tattoo covering your whole back.”

There’s a drawn out silence at their table, wherein Chuck imagines his (half) scarred back covered in a rainbow rendition of Slattern, or something equally dumb. Mako looks like she’s thinking along the same lines.

“Why did you put that one in there?” Gottlieb laments, pointing at Raleigh with a murderous expression. “Why?!”

“I didn’t make the rules,” Raleigh defends, which is patently not true, and also a lie. “But maybe we can amend that to any kind of tattoo?”

“And screw with this level of perfection?” Chuck asks, pointing at his own chest. “I don’t think so.”

But even as he says it, he thinks of the mangled mass of scar tissue along his left leg and the burns creeping up his side and thinks, why the fuck not. Not like there’s much to salvage. 

Before he can sink too deep into that particular pit of despair, though, Raleigh cocks an eyebrow at him. “What? You’re a ranger. Every ranger needs ink of some sort.”

He includes Mako in the challenging look.

“You got any, then?”

The older man nods, pats his left hip and grins, leaving Chuck’s imagination to run wild. 

+

It is, perhaps, testament to how deeply those maniacs have drawn him in in the last few weeks, but that conversation in the cafeteria is pretty much all the convincing Chuck needs to limp after Team Bucket in search of a tattoo parlour somewhere in the Kowloon Boneslum.

Newt has a scribbled set of directions that he refuses to outright admit came from his new black market sugar daddy, and tires to navigate with his really, really shitty Cantonese. 

Mako and Raleigh watch him flail for a while before taking pity on him. Mako grabs the directions and reads them out and Raleigh asks around. She says it’s good for his, frankly, horrible pronunciation. He says she’s just being mean.

Chuck says they’re both full of shit and so cutesy he wants to puke. 

Whatever.

They find the parlour eventually and Newt practically strips his shirt off in the doorway before Gottlieb can even work up a good lather about sanitation standards and health hazards.

Newt waves his boyfriend off and sits down on something that looks like a dentist chair, happily babbling away about how he always wanted the last Kaiju to fill the weirdly shaped hole left on his back (the rest is filled with other, ugly monster faces), but then Otachi came after him and he drifted with Junior and he thinks it’s more appropriate to give the place of honour to the Kaiju that Came for Him.

He actually says it in caps. 

And then he pulls a sketch out of his jeans pocket and shoves it at the artist while Mako is still translating with a half pained, half amused expression on her face. 

The artist looks at Newt weirdly, right up until Mako hands over the directions to his shop, which happen to be written on a red square of cardboard that apparently means something to the man. He names an exorbitant price and says something about seven hours.

Newt just nods along, grins, and waves his sketch.

“Great,” Gottlieb grumps and, sweet baby Jesus, Chuck is just about ready to inject the man with something trippy to make him smile, just once. “We are going to waste the entire day sitting here, watching Newton get high on the point of a needle.”

“We can spend it picking our own designs,” Raleigh, ever the peacemaker, points out.

Gottlieb huffs. “Please. I have been pouring over designs for the past three weeks, ever since Newton informed me of his intention of getting his ‘masterpiece’,” he actually makes finger quotes, “finished before we leave Hong Kong in a month.”

Chuck gapes unattractively, but Raleigh just goes with it, smiling cheekily. “You always were going to go with him.” 

“Of course,” comes the offended answer. “Newton may be insufferable most of the time, but that does not mean that I am immune to his charms.” Another huff. “He is like fungus.”

“Grows on you,” Raleigh supplies the punch line, getting a nod in response. It’s right around that time that Chuck realizes that Gottlieb isn’t here under duress at all. He bitches and moans and stabs people with his cane, but the old fart genuinely loves Newt and he’s here for him, if nothing else. 

He’s actually a part of this madness, which means Chuck is the last voice of reason left on this boat. 

“We’re all doomed,” he groans.

Raleigh, of course, just grins, nods and hooks his arm around the younger pilot’s shoulders. “Yep. And you’re right there with us.”

It shouldn’t feel like praise.

It totally does.

+

Picking a tattoo design is hard.

Chuck would like that noted.

Newt and Gottlieb are obviously taken care of. Newt gets Otachi on his back, which looks painful and bloody and makes his eyes go glassy, while the rest of them talk designs.

Gottlieb is getting some fraction of the formula he used to find the Breach. On his hip. Right where Raleigh said his own ink was. Chuck is still trying to figure out a way to find out what it is. 

Maybe pantsing the idiot would work? God knows the way he wears his pants isn’t regulation, constantly about an inch away from dropping off his hips.

Mako studies the more delicate designs on display for a full hour before Chuck offers, off-handedly, “You should get a butterfly.”

It’d suit her, at any rate.

“In blue,” Newt adds from the dentist’s chair. 

Mako stares at one poster full of different butterflies for a few minutes. “Red,” she finally says.

Chuck is about to comment that it’d clash horribly with her hair, when Raleigh nods, satisfied smile on his face. “He’d like that.”

Pentecost, Chuck guesses, and some sort of memory involving him. Mako laughs a little. It’s the first time Chuck’s heard her laugh in the context of the old man since he went down. It’s good to hear. “He would hate that I am about to get any tattoo at all.”

“Yeah, but he’d appreciate the sentiment behind it.”

Raleigh puts his free arm (the left is still slung around Chuck’s shoulders) around her waist and pulls her into his lap. “He loves you,” he says, and Chuck just knows the present tense is intentional, because somewhere along the line, Raleigh became their resident expert on grief, “and you love him. It’s okay, Mako.”

So Mako gets a blood red butterfly at the very base of her spine, right above the arse and Chuck goes back to staring at cheap, generic images, looking for one he can stand to see for the rest of his days. 

Maybe he should get a jeager’s pneumatic leg joints along his bum leg, a steel and oil reflection of all the pins and screws they put into his bones to keep him whole. (More or less.)

But the scar tissue is still pink and soft and he barely wants to look at it on good days, much less have it on display in a grimy tattoo parlour in the Boneslum.

After about three hours of watching Newt get progressively dopier, Raleigh pulls the little black notebook out of nowhere and starts scribbling in it. He scowls at his masterpiece a few times, flips to a new page, starts over.

Eventually he presents Chuck with a square block of numbers and letters, all written and retraced in his weirdly pretty chicken scratch handwriting. It takes Chuck a moment to read the code and then realize what it is.

“Coordinates,” he finally says. 

“For the Breach,” Gottlieb adds, looking over his shoulder. “ _Exactly_ for the Breach,” he specifies.

Chuck looks at Raleigh, who shrugs. “It’s where you killed your last Kaiju, saved the world and got a second chance, right? Seems like a good reason to commemorate it.”

Chuck wants to tease him about using a big word. But he’s kind of stuck staring at the numbers, trying to figure out why his throat feels tight all of a sudden.

“The place where I didn’t die, yeah?” he finally asks, looking around at his... oh hell, let’s face it, they’re all his friends by now, even grumpy Gottlieb. Hermann, then, he guesses. 

“If that’s how you want to phrase it,” Raleigh allows, while Mako nods. “Yes.”

Okay then.

+

Raleigh gets the outline of Alaska on his right wrist, which seems anticlimactic after the tattoo he made up for Chuck, who simply tells the artist to copy the chicken scratch and slap it on the top of his spine.

But just as Chuck is about to bitch Raleigh out for not getting something sentimental and bloody meaningful like the rest of them, Mako catches him by the wrist and whispers, “It’s where Yancy is buried,” into his ear.

Chuck keeps his mouth shut and tries not to scratch at his new tattoo.

+

Okay, so maybe Chuck should have expected the old man to figure out what came out of the hat last. After all, the five of them are all running around in various stages of gingerness with bandages plastered over more or less visible areas.

Newt is pretty much useless the first two days since his entire back is practically one big, open wound. With ink in it. 

Why is Chuck associating with these people again?

On the third day, when he’s just made the transition from ‘this hurts so badly, I will never wear shirts again’ to ‘can I just scratch that whole patch of skin off, please’, Herc lets himself into his room after dinner and orders, “Off with it, then, son. I wanna see.”

“Kinky,” Chuck comments, not moving.

“Chuck.”

“Herc.”

Herc grinds his teeth because he absolutely _loathes_ Chuck calling him by his given name. “Please.”

Score one for Chuck. 

He stands, leaning carefully against the end of his bunk so he doesn’t go ass over teakettle and strips out of his shirt before giving the old man his back. The tat looks, frankly, horrible. It’s all blurry and crooked. 

Newt assures him that’ll go away when the scab does. “You’ve got a ton of ink and blood caked on there right now. Give it a week.” 

Tattoos are disgusting.

“That’s...” Herc starts, stops, starts again. “The coordinates...”

“I didn’t die,” Chuck supplies, sort of, maybe, to spare the old man having to say it. 

Herc touches the ink, carefully, briefly, and then excuses himself, taking Max on his evening walk because Chuck isn’t really up for that yet. 

Huh.

+

The tattoos seem to keep everyone entertained for a while, or maybe their actual day jobs do, but whatever it is, Chuck doesn’t see the damn hat for over two weeks after their little adventure into Kowloon.

He watches the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy again and then downloads the Hobbit films, too. He’d ask the has-been if he feels like hanging out, but that’d a) be embarrassing and b) he’s busy helping Mako with some project anyway.

Probably.

Chuck stares at walls a lot and rattles off the items on his bucket list in his head. He goes to physio and actually makes Alex cuss him out. He figures out a way to hold Max’s leash while using his crutches.

He stands in front of the memorial they put up for the lost pilots of the last days, staring at Pentecost’s picture until his leg cramps up, wondering why the fuck the man thought it was a good idea to stick Chuck in a pod and rob him of his blast of glory. 

In short, he goes fucking nuts.

So after two full weeks, he breaks into Raleigh’s room, finds the hat and draws a new item to take to dinner with him. He’d take the whole hat, but he needs both hands to walk these days. 

Fuck everything.

At dinner he sits at their usual table (because they _have_ a usual table, no more separation by crew, now that there’s no more jaegers) and slaps the paper between their trays. 

“Explain, Becket,” he commands, removing his hand from the scribble that simply reads, _Yancy_. 

Raleigh stares at the name on the paper like he isn’t the one who wrote it down, then sticks it in his pocket. “I didn’t mean to put that in there,” he explains, then makes a decent attempt at a heartbroken smile and adds, “I was in a coma for the funeral. And afterwards, I never visited... the grave. But unless you can get us a chopper to Alaska on the fly, this one’s off the table.”

Then he stabs his fork into his potatoes and stands, ruffling Mako’s hair on his way out. They all watch him go while Chuck pulls over his abandoned tray and, between bites, sums the whole situation up in a single, heartfelt, “Well, fuck.”

Mako turns away from the empty doorway to glare at him, although whether that’s because he scared off her buddy or because he’s talking with his mouth full, Chuck can’t tell. 

Newt, oblivious to any glaring going on, shrugs and puts his spoon down. “That sucks man.”

“Funerals tend to do,” Hermann agrees.

Chuck nods. “Yancy’s was a nightmare. The vultures were everywhere.”

The press got wind of the funeral because it was so late. Yancy’s body was recovered by the fishermen the Becket brothers had saved, over three days after the battle. When they’d finally put the elder Becket in the ground, just about _everyone_ was there. The first pilot to fall in years. 

In hindsight, Yancy Becket marked the beginning of the end and Chuck remembers standing next to his dad at the grave, in the fucking cold, watching everyone be dignified and thinking about how none of the people standing around the grave were family. 

Yancy was buried alone, for all that there were hundreds of people there that day. 

He only notices everyone staring at him when he makes a grab for Raleigh’s glass, too. 

“What?”

“You were there?”

“My old man made me go. Something about respect.” About not getting too cocky, he thinks, but doesn’t say. 

Mako hums quietly in agreement and goes back to staring at the door. Chuck finishes the mashed potatoes and then kicks at Newt under the table. “That pons you rigged for Junior. You still have it?”

Newt’s crestfallen expression says no before Hermann explains, “It was unsalvageable after we used it. Kaiju Blue corrosion.”

“Can you build another one?”

“Yes, but why... oh, you wanna drift with Raleigh, show him the memory of his brother’s funeral? That’s kind of... I gotta, Hermann, do we still have all the stuff from when they emptied out that lab?”

Mako nods, “We saved almost everything that seemed useful. I have full access.”

And then Newt’s off like a shot, followed by Hermann and Mako, leaving Chuck with a whole bunch of half-eaten dinners and no-one to talk to. The rewards of altruism, he guesses. 

Assholes.

+

“Hey, Chuckles?” a voice behind him asks and Chuck really hopes it’s Newt, because if anyone else called him that, he’d have to break their face.

Technically, he has to break Newt’s, too, but somehow the fact that the guy’s this insulting to everyone makes it easier to stomach. 

Whatever.

Newt comes bouncing up and Chuck wonders, not for the first time, how Hermann can get him to hold still long enough to fuck. Or eat. Speak. Get anything done, basically. 

The mad scientist is juggling what looks like random garbage to Chuck, but probably isn’t. 

“Can you get the door, man?”

“Sure. That for the pons?”

“Yeah. Hermann took the elevator with the big bits, but this didn’t fit. He made me run the stairs. Asshole. We’ll be done in a bit though, no worries. A few days, max. We’re getting there.”

“No stress, mate. Just make sure it doesn’t fry our brains.”

“No! I mean, yes! Of course. The only reason the first version went kind of wooby was because I was doing it alone and also, there might have been sleep deprivation involved, right, and the whole Kaiju factor. I think Hermann is actually planning on calling it that. The Kaiju Factor. I know, tacky right? And anyway, while we’re talking.”

He almost drops a... thing, juggles to catch it and loses his grip on three other things at the same time. Chuck barely manages to pluck something he’s fairly sure used to be part of a jaeger’s navigation system off the top of the pile before it goes flying.

Newt somehow, impossibly, manages to catch himself and all of his crap, balance and even take back the thing from Chuck.

“Thanks. Anyway. You. What you’re doing, for Raleigh, that’s kind of... I mean, have you seen the way the guy looks like someone killed his puppy in front of him and...” he stops walking abruptly. The pile in his arms sways threateningly. Chuck is trying to figure out how to position himself so as not to get buried by the avalanche. “Wow. Bad analogy right there. Sorry. It’s just.... it’s a pretty decent thing to do, letting him into your skull just so he can see... that. 

“Ever since Hermann and I,” he shrugs his shoulders and waggles his eyebrow in a way that either means ‘had sex’ or ‘drifted together’. From the context, Chuck really hopes it’s the second. “I know what it’s like, letting someone under your skin like that, I thought you’d just share thoughts, you know? Memories. But it’s... Hermann’s started putting sugar in his coffee, which he hates, and sometimes my leg hurts for no fucking reason at all. And...”

For once, the little guy seems at a loss, so Chuck helps him out. “It’s more than memories,” he agrees.

It’s habit and the way you walk, it’s emotion shared and temper doubled, it’s grief and panic and fear and love and loss, times two and divided by two and that should nullify the whole thing, but it doesn’t. 

And somehow Chuck volunteered to do that with Raleigh Fucking Becket without even thinking about it. Just because the guy looks so damn beaten when his brother is mentioned. 

Because, if he’s honest, Chuck hates that look and how damn _broken_ the older pilot sometimes is. 

Which is one side.

The other side, the one he hasn’t even thought of until now, includes the fact that Raleigh will see his embarrassing childhood crush and all the Gipsy Danger posters Chuck stole from Mako’s magazines. He’ll see the fumbling sex Chuck’s tried to have since he was sixteen and how he keeps a picture of his Mum tucked away in his bunk and how he stole it from Herc’s wallet a decade ago and still lets the man think he lost it. 

It’s all the little things he’s only ever shared with his dad and he volunteered to let Raleigh see them without thinking.

Fuck. 

He sways a bit with the realization, tries to play it off. “Guess it’s a good thing I’m not dead then, huh?” He waves a crutch for emphasis.

“Dude,” Newt announces, stopping in front of the double doors leading into the lab. “You’re not just ‘not dead’. You’re alive. Take it from a biologist: there’s a difference.”

He winks, clacks his tongue and sweeps inside, where Hermann is already waiting to lay into him for one reason or another. 

Chuck stays in the hallway, staring at the door for far too long.

Fuck.

+

Five days later, Newt spears a piece of peach cobbler (jury’s still out on whether those are real peaches) and points it at Chuck. “Operation Cracker Lacker is a go, by the way.”

“What?”

Behind his dorky glasses, Newt blinks. “Uhm, that thing we talked about? With the...” he makes a hand gesture that might either mean ‘wank off’ or ‘that Pons we’re secretly building in the basement’. The tiny guy is the king of ambivalent gestures.

“What the hell is a Cracker Lacker?” Raleigh asks, confused.

“Good question,” Mako agrees.

Newt shrugs. “It sounded cool. So I used it to name the thing.”

“I think it’s an old slang term,” Hermann supplies, unperturbed by his boyfriend’s shenanigans.

“I think it might be racist,” Chuck adds, brow furrowed. “And also, you’re not allowed to name shit anymore. Hermann, control your boy toy.”

“Hey! I am not Hermann’s...,” frowning, Newt interrupts himself. “Who am I kidding, I am absolutely Hermann’s boy toy. So, we driftin’ or what?”

He makes jazz hands to go with the question. Hermann catches them with his own and puts them in Newt’s lap. It looks like he’s using his nails to force compliance. Chuck approves wholeheartedly. Someone needs to muzzle their resident Kaiju groupie. 

“Drifting?” Raleigh asks. It’s kind of adorable, the way he looks when the adults are talking about things he doesn’t understand. 

Chuck gives up his pie as a lost cause, shoves to his feet and accepts the crutches Mako hands him, almost without looking. 

“Let’s go, bitches,” he tells them.

Surprisingly, they all go. 

+

“You... built a Pons. Out of garbage. What for?” Raleigh wants to know, standing in front of a truly... terrifying amalgamation of everything anyone in the ‘dome has ever thrown away.

The only thing Chuck recognizes even vaguely is the set of squid caps dangling over what looks like an upside-down footstool with three legs. It’s screwed onto a piece of drainpipe that spews wires from both ends. 

Considering Chuck’s about to attach his brain to that thing, he is not reassured. Still, he puts on a brave face and slaps Raleigh on the back. Hard. “You and me, mate,” he tells the older pilot, “are going to chase a RABIT.”

Before Raleigh can ask any more questions, Mako steps in and does her reasonable and responsible adult face as she explains, “After you told us to forget about your contribution to the list, we talked and realized that Chuck attended your brother’s funeral. He is willing to share the memory with you, if you want. To that end, the doctors have built a Pons for you to use.”

Raleigh looks at Chuck, at the geeks, at Mako, at the Pons, back at Chuck. “You... really?”

If he cries, Chuck’s outta here. 

Just sayin’.

“Yeah, dude,” Newt pipes up. “Course we did. Building these things is actually fun. I’m starting to get the hang of it. Didja know you can actually convert sparkplugs into...,” whatever he did to the poor spark plugs will forever remain a mystery because Hermann slaps a hand over his mouth. It’s probably better for Chuck’s sanity to not know.

“Forgive Newton. He gets excited. And yes, Raleigh, really. We agreed, some more voluntarily than others,” he shoots a glare at Newt, but no-one buys that shit anymore, these days, “to see this blasted list through to the end. Your item is part of that list.”

“It’s what friends do,” Mako pipes up, taking the has-been’s hand and squeezing. 

Chuck gives the sentimentality in the air a moment to settle before he points one crutch at the hellish contraption at the centre of the room. “So, wanna get our brains fried?”

+

They have both drifted enough times to know how to keep the Drift itself silent and still. 

There’s only that strange haze of half-glimpsed memories until Chuck takes a deep breath and lets himself fall backward, away from the dull pain in his leg, from the pressure of the squid cap, the muttering of the scientists calibrating something, the whispers of Mako speaking to Max.

He lets himself fall backwards to six years ago on a fucking freezing afternoon in March, a cemetery in blinding light, too many solemn officials around a hole in the ground.

Raleigh follows after him a second after he slams into his sixteen-year-old body, all gangly limbs and ginger hair. It takes him a moment to orient himself, to remember that he’s not actually that boy, squinting against the sun and hating the world and feeling terribly sad because one of his childhood heroes is being buried without his brother to see him off.

Then he gets a grip on himself and pulls back from his emotions on that day. “Fuck,” he mutters, shaking his head. Next to him, his memory of his father doesn’t even bat an eyelash. 

He waves a hand for Raleigh to go ahead, watches the other man step forward, look around. He takes in the faces briefly, then walks straight up to the coffin running a gentle hand over the edge. 

He starts talking, low and urgent, all the things he didn’t get to say before, and Chuck forces himself not to hear every word by turning away and walking around the edge of the crowd.

Walking. 

On his own two feet, unmangled, unbroken. 

Jesus, but he’d almost forgotten already, what that feels like, to have two working legs and take them both for granted. 

He sprints, brakes, fucking _skips_ his way around the funeral once, twice, and then gets a damn grip on himself and returns to his proper place in the memory just in time to see Raleigh pick up one of the white roses piled at the foot of the coffin and place it carefully on top.

Chuck’s still not listening in, but there is no way to mistake that shape of the lips for anything other than what it is: “Goodbye.”

He feels it. This is still inside the drift and they are linked, one inside the other’s head and when Raleigh says goodbye to his long dead brother, Chuck _feels it_. 

He hasn’t felt anything like it since Scissure took his mom.

And with that thought, he throws them out of alignment badly enough to slam them back, first into their own minds, and then their bodies.

Raleigh is crying when they bounce back to reality, tears running unchecked down his face, and Mako already has him wrapped in a hug from behind, pressing against him tightly.

Chuck finds himself reaching out, too, then pulls back. 

Fucking drift hangover. 

He stands and is about to flee as fast as his gimp leg (and doesn’t it hurt twice as bad, now that he remembers being whole again?) will carry him, when Raleigh catches his crutch, stopping him.

“I never got the chance to say goodbye,” he tells Chuck, still crying and still not giving a fuck. “I never thought I would. That was the worst thing. And I...”

Chuck swallows, pulls loose and gets the hell out of there.

+

He hobbles right past his room and toward his father’s office.

“Chuck,” Herc greets, looking and sounding surprised, then doing a double take when he actually looks up and, oh, yeah, Chuck probably doesn’t look too hot. He might be crying, too, just a little.

He _felt it_.

“I drifted,” he blurts, standing awkwardly in front of the huge desk, staring at Herc. “with Raleigh. He never saw Yancy’s funeral and so the geeks rigged us up a Pons – which, by the way, is truly terrifying, they build those things out of _anything_ \- and we went in and watched that fucking funeral again because Rals wasn’t there and Yancy was buried-“

Alone. Yancy Becket was buried alone and Raleigh never got to say goodbye. But Chuck will turn in his dick if he ever says that out loud. 

“I’m sorry, son,” Herc says after a long beat of awkward silence. But then, with them, the silence always is. For once, the title doesn’t make Chuck want to scream. 

He waves his old man off, though. “That’s not... it’s fine. Raleigh and Mako are braiding their hair right now and talking about feelings and shit and maybe it’ll do that washed-up has-been good. I just...” 

This isn’t working. He screws his eyes shut, hates the way he always relied on the drift to say everything for him and then feels something warm and smooth down his spine.

Raleigh, he realizes after a second of shock. He is ghost drifting with Raleigh Fucking Becket and the older pilot is sending him warm fuzzies. He pushes back, angrily, because he needs all that crappy emotion right now, if he ever wants to get this out right. 

“My bucket list said _tell dad_ ,” he tries again. 

“Tell me what, Chuck?” Herc asks, standing, rounding the desk and stopping way inside Chuck’s personal space.

Chuck laughs. “See, that’s the thing I could never figure out. But...” deep breath. 

“Mom,” he finally says. “Mom dying. It wasn’t your fault, Dad.”

With that he turns tail and runs. Herc, god bless the Hansen family’s emotional stuntedness, lets him go.

+

The reprieve is temporary. Since Chuck had to get his doggedness from _somewhere_ , he’s not really too surprised to find the newly minted Marshall waiting for him at his door the next morning. 

He claps Chuck on the shoulder too hard, gives him a crooked grin and then leads the way to breakfast. It’s early because Chuck was actually trying to _avoid_ any sort of meaningful human interaction, no matter who with, but apparently, his father knows him, which sucks.

Except for how it doesn’t. Eugh.

They both get trays full of real eggs and bacon and industrial strength tea and Herc carries both their breakfasts while Chuck hobbles along behind him and Max trails after them both.

Alex says that whenever Chuck’s ready, he can try leaving one crutch at home. Chuck is absolutely not going to try that experiment in public, thanks a lot. He’ll practice in his room until he can keep the face-falling to a minimum. So for now, two crutches and no free hands it is.

He sits down first and Herc stares at him for a long moment before shuffling around the table and sitting next to him, instead of across from him. Their shoulders bump. It’s the Hansen version of a thirty-second hug with extra squeezing. 

They eat in companionable silence, except for the occasional comment on the sleep deprived techs stumbling in one by one. One of them actually manages to keep his eyes closed all the way through the line and up to his table. It’s impressive. 

Chuck applauds when the guy sits without spilling a drop of his coffee. Herc elbows him, but he’s grinning into his ginger stubble, so that’s cool.

And then Raleigh shows up and Chuck cringes because a) he let the guy into his head last night, b) he was in the guy’s head last night, c) he had an embarrassing emotional outbreak caused by the guy and d) he knows Raleigh by now and he knows the man will do something horrible like thank him and actually try to hug him, or something. Chuck shudders at the possibilities.

But all Raleigh does is wave casually, pet Max, and then get some grub. He plops down across from them with a nod to Herc and puts two chocolate puddings down in front of Chuck. 

They’re his favourite. They are also usually only available at dinner and rare enough to have become a coveted currency. Chuck has heard whispers of a chocolate pudding black market running out of LOCCENT. He always knew Tendo’s a crafty motherfucker.

So for Raleigh to put not only one, but two of the little cups down in front of Chuck means... something. Thank you, probably.

Chuck blinks at the little cups. 

Herc snorts a little laugh and then pretends to be fascinated by his eggs. Good man. 

“Seriously?” Chuck asks, eventually, because he has a reputation as a smart-ass to uphold.

Raleigh gives him the eyebrow. “Would you rather hug it out?” He doesn’t add the ‘bitch’ at the end, but it is implied. Raleigh trying to speak Chuck’s language is kind of... frightening. And also embarrassing. 

And working. 

Let’s not forget the ‘working’.

Chuck scowls, gives him the finger and plucks one of the cups from the table. He gives it a good shake just to be a vindictive asshole and then puts it on Raleigh’s tray, next to his coffee. 

They stare at each other. Herc coughs. It sounds a lot like, “Idiots.”

Then Raleigh shrugs and starts shovelling food into his mouth like it’s going out of style. In between forkfuls, he muses, “I think Li has a serious problem with me, although I have no idea why. The guy has been giving me the stink-eye forever. Any ideas why?”

Herc chokes. Hopefully on his mysterious ‘cough’. Chuck digs the heel of his good leg into the man’s instep. Hard. 

“Nah, mate,” he finally answers, managing to keep his face straight. “He’s probably just being an asshole. Don’t mind him.”

He makes a mental note to call the grumpy cook off. 

+

Hermann draws one of his own items, which at least proves that the man actually contributed. Chuck was starting to doubt it. 

But of course the fifth thing coming from the damn hat needs to be Hermann’s because everyone else has had a turn and this is obviously a Mexican telenovela, or something equally idiotic, except that there’s probably not enough sex for that. Telenovelas have lots of ridiculous sex, right? 

He’s never watched one, but he thinks everything in those things is ridiculous. 

And Chuck’s living in the middle of one. What’s that make him?

So it’s Hermann’s turn to draw and it’s Hermann’s turn to be drawn and everything is cosmic balance and someone’s shitting butterflies at the end of the rainbow. 

“ _A night under the stars_ ,” the doctor reads and Chuck almost gags. He opens his mouth to make a snide comment, but before he can, Mako stomps on his foot none too delicately. 

“Bitch,” he mutters under his breath. She smiles at him. Raleigh shoots him a look, but it’s not the glare it would have been before the drift. Chuck kind of hates how Raleigh just looks straight through him now. 

Except for when he doesn’t. Hate it, he means. Shit. 

Hermann, not quite oblivious to the byplay, gives a flustered shrug. “I was a sickly child,” he explains, “and never allowed outside much. I have always wanted to camp outside and sleep under the stars one night. I did not think I would get the chance.”

He doesn’t need to elaborate on why. Because the world was ending. Because they were all dying. Because the stars were going out in the sky and the world was preparing to just lie down and die.

Until they saved it. 

Hey, Chuck just rhymed.

“Here’s to us,” Raleigh suddenly announces, his eyes fixed on Chuck’s face, raising his mug. They’ve broken into the moonshine again.

“I will drink to that,” Mako announces. They clink mugs and take small sips. Cute. 

“So, what are we waiting for?” Chuck asks.

He gets incredulous looks from Raleigh and Newt.

“Dude! We need about a million things to do this! Starting with a place to set up camp, because I don’t think there’s many of those is Hong Kong. Although maybe Hannibal would let us use his rooftop terrace...”

“Or maybe,” Hermann suggests archly, “we could not spend the night in the criminal’s literal backyard! Do you want to have your throat slit?”

“Actually,” Newt corrects, “I’m pretty sure Hannibal’s more of a stabby guy.” He mimics stabbing something. “In the nose.”

“We’ll take your word for it,” Mako assures him. 

“Has anyone ever actually gone camping?” Raleigh asks into the round. Headshakes from Mako and Hermann, obviously. “Chuck?”

“Nah, mate. City boy, me.”

Newt nods. “My old man tried to make a man out of me.” He swivels his hips, pouts horribly and then snorts. “Didn’t take.”

Raleigh claps him on the shoulder. “Then I suggest we divide and conquer. I’ll get the gear, you get provisions. Mako, can you find us a place? You know the ‘dome best.”

Nods all around. “Great. Regroup here in an hour.”

Apparently, you can take the Ranger out of the military, but you can’t take the military out of the Ranger. Mako actually snaps off a salute on her way out the door and the geeks toddle after her, mumbling about staging a coup in the kitchen to get their hands on some chocolate pudding.

Li is going to send them back in sushi rolls if they try.

But the three little soldiers taking off means that Chuck gets saddled following Raleigh on a trip cross-‘dome in search of all kinds of shit he never knew you needed for a single night outside. 

“Why do we need mats _and_ blankets? And don’t you think the sleeping bags are overkill, mate? We’re all damn rangers.” He conveniently forgets about the less trained members of their little idiocy-squad.

“It gets cold at night.”

“It’s June.”

Raleigh grins a little. “It gets cold. Trust me.”

“You know we’re not in goddamn Alaska, right?”

Chuck grimaces as soon as he’s finished talking, expecting that little hurt twitch Raleigh gets every time someone mentions anything even tangentially related to his brother, but all that comes is an easy shrug. “Alaska has summers, okay? And I used to spend about half of those camped outside with Yancy. Trust me.”

“Why?” Chuck immediately asks and there’s that little hurt twitch, so he rolls his eyes and elaborates. “Why’d you spend so much time outside?”

A shrug. “Our parents fought a lot.”

Enough, apparently, to drive two boys out of their own home. Involuntarily, Chuck thinks of his own parents, and the way his Mum would have invaded the Becket home with a broomstick and a twenty minute tirade before taking the Becket boys home with her and stuffing them into the bottom bunk of Chuck’s bed. She probably wouldn’t have given them back, either, because that’s the kind of woman Angela Hansen was.

Chuck still spends most of his time missing her, but it’s times like these that he appreciates that, for ten years, he _had_ her.

He comes out of his little mental detour to find Raleigh trying to stack five sets of blankets, sleeping mats and sleeping bags in a way that lets him carry all of it. 

“Gimme some of that,” Chuck demands.

Raleigh looks at him, then down at his crutches. Right. Chuck swings one crutch free, looks around a little for a place to put it and finds one of his father’s aides tottering down the hallway with an armful of requisition forms. He puts his crutch horizontally across the stack of paper, gives her a smarmy grin and orders, “Get that to the Marshall’s office.”

She gives him a wide-eyed look, then nods. Somehow, all the aides are terrified of the Hansen temper. Chuck wonders why, because it sure as shit wasn’t _him_.

He waits until she’s disappeared into a random office, then holds out his hand for the bundle of sleeping bags. They have straps; he should be fine.

“You sure you can do this?”

“If I face plant, you aren’t allowed to take pictures,” he says, makes a grab for the stuff and starts limping ahead.

+

“I want more blankets,” he announces, hours later. He’s already got his and Raleigh’s bunched around his shoulders, plus his sleeping mat folded twice and stuck under his arse and his sleeping bag wrapped around his waist. Raleigh, the icy fucker, sits next to him, wearing nothing but one of his ugly sweaters, looking like it’s a mild summer’s day, instead of the fucking Arctic on top of the Shatterdome’s highest helipad.

“Told ya,” the smug bastard announces, pulling a spare blanket from out of nowhere and draping it over Chuck’s locked-up gimp leg. Apparently, it doesn’t deal well with cold anymore. 

He tucks the blanket in around Chuck’s hips and then actually moves around until he’s sitting along the bad leg and starts rubbing some feeling back into it, careful not to jar the knee joint, which got the brunt of the fucked-up-ness. 

“Seriously,” Chuck muses. “How the fuck can anyone want to live in fucking Alaska?”

“Born and bred,” the other pilot points out.

Chuck shudders. “I want some of Hermann’s baby killer shit.” He makes a shooing motion with both hands and then desperately grabs for the blankets sliding off his shoulders.

Raleigh snorts. “Cold and booze don’t mix. You think it makes you warm, but it doesn’t.”

“I’m going to die out here, aren’t I?”

Another snort. Chuck’s elbow him, but he needs both arms to contain heat. “I thought you’re a big, bad ranger?”

“Retired.”

“More like washed-out.”

And that could sting like a mother, except Chuck knows exactly how Raleigh meant that and it has nothing to do with his leg and when did he learn to read between Raleigh bloody Becket’s lines?

“Didn’t you have to do survival training or something?”

“I’m from _Australia_ , mate.”

“Alright, alright, come here.” And suddenly Chuck’s tucked under the older man’s arm, all snug and warm and he’d protest, if it weren’t so damn cosy.

“If you try to get your hands under my skirt, I will murder you.”

“Don’t worry, honey, I don’t grope before the third date.” There’s something off about the way he says it, but Chuck lets it go. He’s awesome like that. 

It’s actually kind of nice, up here. Apart from the fact that his balls have retreated into his body. Probably permanently. It’s a cloudless night and there are actually a few stars visible above the city.

It’s kind of sad, but the Kaiju made for clearer skies in most coastal cities. Large portions of the population fled inland and a lot was destroyed. 

Light pollution, smog, all that shit’s been cut down drastically. 

And isn’t that cute. Here he is, badass jaeger piloting ranger superhero, thinking of the good things the Kaiju brought.

Less pollution above Hong Kong. An appreciation for the smaller things in life. Raleigh fucking Becket, shirtless on a poster Chuck will deny to his dying day belongs to him. 

Just... stuff.

Little things here and there, that didn’t seem to matter before. (Not that Chuck really remembers before. He was barely knee high when the world ended.)

Stuff like being alive.

And he is. Alive, he means. 

He’s spending a night under the stars with two idiotic doctors arguing over a can of peaches, of all things, a girl he almost called sister once before he started to hate everything, and the most impossible dopey idiot he’s ever met. His leg is a bust, he looks like he survived fifty rounds with a Balrog or something (Shut up, he watched those movies under duress), and he’ll never run with max again.

And it’s okay. 

\- And now he’s apparently having an epiphany because Mexican telenovela. Fuck his life. 

A few feet away, the scientists finally manage to get the can open and promptly dump most of its contents all over the dirty tarmac. Mako watches them with the expression of a displeased mother. Chuck feels for any future children she might one day deign to have. 

“Hey,” he says, digging his elbow into Raleigh’s side.

“Mhm?” is the answer he gets. It sounds sleepy. It’s excuse enough for Chuck to just play it off and shut the fuck up.

“You know, the geek made a point the other day.”

“Which one?”

“Not the point,” he grouses.

He can feel Raleigh shift as he takes note of Chuck’s mood. They’re ghosting again. “I thought this was all about points.”

Elbow. In the ribs. He tries not to gasp in pain and Chuck breezily goes on. “So, he said some shit about how not being dead is not the same as being alive. Biologically speaking.”

Newt is now arguing for the three second rule to also be applied to the great outdoors (which they are not in, actually). Hermann threatens to withhold sex if Newt’s mouth gets anywhere near the fallen peaches. 

Newt sucks one down just to prove his point.

Chuck should maybe not base this leap of faith of Dr. Newton Geiszler. 

Different angle. 

“You wrote out all the items on all the lists, right?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“You remember the one about sex?”

 _Have decent sex._

Fact is, Chuck’s been a little too busy saving the world to find anyone who had time for more than a casual roll in the hay before shift change. 

“Yeah?”

“You notice how I got your _girly handwriting_ tattooed on my fucking back?”

“Yeah?”

There’s a long silence where Chuck will deny holding himself very still.

“Are you trying to tell me something, Chuck?”

Goddamn.

“You’ve been in my head. Figure it out, Becket.”

“You mean that head that was filled with trashy posters of me, stats of me and possibly an action figure of me?”

Chuck is going to murder that fucking bastard.

“I am going to fucking murder you.”

Raleigh, the little bitch, just laughs. “Chuck, if you’re trying to tell me something, just tell me.”

That was exactly what he was trying to avoid actually, thanks a lot. (One day, Chuck will get over his issues and he will send the bill to his father without regrets.)

“Look, if you don’t mind that I’m a damn cripple-“

“Stop,” Raleigh order and hello there, command voice. “Stop acting like you’re the consolation prize, Chuck.”

That is... that is so fucking cheesy that Chuck must either commit sepuku with his crutch right now or kiss the stunted asshole stupid. 

He goes with number two. 

Tongue down throat, teeth in lip, count his teeth, the whole nine yards and back again and he does not get butterflies in his stomach because he doesn’t do that shit. 

After a minute, they come up for air. “Jesus, Chuck, I didn’t think you want to try for the decent sex thing right here.”

“We don’t mind,” Newt chimes in from where he’s sitting, holding a hand over Mako’s eyes and staring at them avidly. “Please carry on.”

Hermann gets him with the cane. Chuck might need lessons. “Newton, stop your racket. And take your hand down. Mako wins the bet whether she sees the outcome or not.”

“Bet?”

And Raleigh dives back in, one hand gently resting on Chuck’s gimp leg, the other trailing up his back until it comes to rest right on top of the ink there. 

If he thinks about it, Chuck sort of got a Raleigh Becket tramp stamp.

So he decides not to think about it. 

+

They strike the _decent sex_ thing from the list, eventually. 

But not until they’ve traumatised half the ‘dome’s leftover inhabitants and christened most flat surfaces. (He’s pretty sure Newt it making a pretty penny selling grainy CCTV footage of them getting it on on ebay.)

Chuck still has no fucking idea what to make of the fact that he’s survived. 

But he’s here and alive and for now, that’s enough. 

Fucking Mexican telenovela. 

+

+

(He never does call off Li.)

+

+


End file.
